One question I get asked a lot is ‘how long does it take for you to make a picture book?’ I understand why people want to know, but I can’t help but think it’s the wrong question with what is likely to be an unhelpful answer.

I know that I can knock out a fairly competent editorial spot illustration in about an hour. A storyboard for a 32-page picture book will take me a weekend. A picture book spread averages out at about 2 hours, give or take the complexity of the scene. The final art takes about 4 hours per spread.

Now that I’ve said that, another artist reading will have one of two responses. The first response is “Wow, that’s so much faster than I can do it, I’m so slow”. The second response is, “Wow, that’s really slow, I’m heaps faster than that.”

Does the comparison matter?

But, there’s a lot that goes unsaid in the response to the question. Do you mean elapsed time (which includes waiting for paint to dry?), or do you mean active time (the time I spend actually putting brush and pencil to paper?) By the way, which mediums are we talking about? Pencil? Watercolour? Oil? Acrylic? Mixed media? Which ones do you use? Which ones do I use? They all have an inherent relationship with time.

If I gave a response to ‘how long does it take to make a picture book’ that was twice as long, or half as long, what difference would it make?

Humans tend to equate effort with quality (i.e. The Effort Bias). People will tend to value a drawing more if I said I spent 12 months on it as opposed to 12 minutes. So, knowing this, I could make another artist think whatever I wanted them to think by answering the question of ‘how long does it take to make a drawing’ in whichever way suited my self-interest. Maybe Bruce Whateley’s “Ruben” took just as much time as “Eric the Postie”. Does that make one better or worse?

Things aren’t slow, we just imagine them to fast.

Whilst it helps our meagre human brains to think about things in time, effort, and quality, there’s often very little relationship between those things when it comes to art-making – especially when we’re trying to use those things to compare ourselves to others. Some of us need to labour over a drawing for 12 months. Some of us get the ‘divine inspiration’ and a drawing falls out on to the page in a matter of minutes.

A better approach might be to focus on the most authentic work we can make for ourselves, regardless of how long it takes. Instead of ‘how long does it take?’ maybe a better question is ‘why did you make it?’ or ‘what did you learn from it?’ If the work we make is about helping us learn more about ourselves – sometimes some lessons take longer than others and that’s OK.

I’ve heard the ‘draw everyday’ mantra so often and from so many people that I feel guilty if I go to bed one day without putting pencil to paper. The idea is that the more often you draw, the better you become at drawing.

The problem with this thinking is that it assumes that the drawing is the end goal; that I want to make better drawings. It assumes that if I don’t draw everyday (which I don’t), I’m not as good as I could be, that I’m not living up to my ‘potential.’ That just makes me feel even worse.

What this advice seems to fail to recognise is that I’m not motivated by the drawing, I’m motivated to draw because of what drawing does to me.

Drawing (and making art in general), teaches me about myself. It reveals what I’m scared of, what I enjoy, what makes me laugh and cry. It shows me, clearer than anything else, what my weaknesses are and what I’m good at.

All aboard

When I say that drawing shows me my weaknesses, I don’t mean ‘I struggle drawing feet’. I mean I discover that I can be impatient because I hate how long it takes for watercolour to dry. That I frustrate easily when I fail time and again to get a simple curve right. That I don’t value my own opinion enough or that I lack confidence because I find that I go seeking validation from anyone that’ll give me 30 seconds of their attention. Drawing has revealed those things to me and, because of drawing, I’ve been able to work on them in other parts of my life so I can be a better partner, son, colleague, and friend.

The more your draw, the more you learn… about yourself

In fact, even this observation alone has come from drawing more regularly than I normally do. I still won’t draw everyday – the lessons I learn about myself from drawing need time to proof and settle in other parts of my life, anyway. But, perhaps there are others who need to re-contextualise why drawing is important to them. Sure, the ‘craft’ of it is one thing, (and yes, I should practice drawing more feet), but possibly discovering those automatic parts of oneself could be more motivating over the long run.

I find the act of drawing much more difficult than the act of writing. Maybe it’s because writing, especially on the computer, has a constrained set of marks (just 26 in fact, plus punctuation), so all I need to do is put those together in various ways until I’m happy with them. It’s easy to change those 26 marks at any time and iterate them towards something I like more. I never find myself too attached to any combination of words at any time. (This might also be because I hold myself to a lower standard of craft with words but that’s a whole other thought).

Drawing is different. With drawing, the number of marks is, quite literally, infinite. The effort required to produce a mistake, only to correct it repeatedly, through the millions of possible variations, is orders of magnitude more difficult for me to get something I’m happy with than when I make marks with words.

Because of the effort required with drawing, I’m a little more resistant to throwing things out that I don’t particularly like even though they’re ‘finished’. I say things to myself like, ‘it’s good enough’ or ‘no one but me cares or will notice’. But, if even I’m not moved by the work I produce, why would I expect others to be moved by it?

The reality is, not every drawing is a keeper. In fact, most of them are fishing for the bait that needs to be found to catch the bigger fish. And, as any fisher would know, there’s nothing quite like catching the fish you’ve been looking for, especially if it’s taken much longer or much more effort than you expected.

The story I tell about my journey into illustration goes something like this: I was burned out looking at computer screens in my job as a software designer. My wife bought me a student watercolour kit for Christmas one year as a way to ‘disconnect’. It worked. I loved it. I loved playing once again with physical stuff – water, pigment, time, and gravity. Not only did I love it but it unlocked and entirely new career and feeling of purpose in my life beyond my ‘day job.’

That’s a lot. It’s a powerful story, that’s why I tell it.

But I’ve just spent a weekend sketching and drawing digitally. I have to say, I loved that, too. It’s different, sure. And it doesn’t get me away from the computer – that’s true, too. I can’t deny it though, it’s been fun.

The problem with accepting this is that it feels like it’s challenging my origin story. In fact, I’ve avoided exploring digital illustration work for a long time because of this. My story, as much as I loved it, may have been holding me back.

And now, just because I’m enjoying new things, it doesn’t make that origin story less legitimate, the story remains the same, it’s just a new chapter I’m writing for it – and it’s a good one because I’m really looking forward to what’s coming next even though I don’t know what it will be.

It made me wonder whether others are trapped by their stories?

Nursing, teaching, social work, music, & art are widely known to be some of the least paid jobs in our society today even though, at a human level, we all agree that they’re important.

The thing is, capitalism doesn’t seem to reward (or need to motivate), the stuff we’ll do anyway. Teaching and caring for one another is something that lives deep within our programming. To not do so feels some how inhuman to many (not all) of us. The same goes for writing, poetry, music, and visual art. Telling stories is so ‘below the surface’ of what it means to be human that we’re often not even aware we’re doing it.

In Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, two characters talk about why they toil on the land in the face of a progressing world when, instead, they could be doing far more profitable things with their time. One looks to the other and says, “I don’t know, to keep the sacred fire burning, I suppose.”

I like that.

I recently worked out that I’ll only be able to read about 300 more novels in my lifetime if I keep going at my current rate. Assuming I live to 80 (the current life expectancy for a male in Australia), and working at a rate of, on average, 1 or 2 books per year, I’ll be able to produce, probably, 50 more picture books – and that’s even if publishers continue to exist, and that those publishers continue to feel like my work is sellable for a profit. (As an aside, I don’t like those chance).

I can’t scale me. Nor do I want to. And so, if I’ve only got 50 more books in me, what does it mean for the importance of each one? Should I pick and choose carefully? How do I make a decision about what to work on? Is it better to be published even though it’s work that may not answer the questions that I need art to answer for me? Or, do I double-down on a private relationship with drawing and mark-making to see what sort of person I become through it, whether someone buys it or not? Right now, I’m leaning to the latter but the allure of recognition and validation of ‘good’ work (aka marketable, profit-making work) is a difficult thing to shake – and I haven’t got long to decide.

Running into the marsh, Laska at once detected, all over the place, mingled with the familiar smells of roots, marsh grass, slime, and the extraneous odour of horse dung, the scent of birds – of that strong-smelled bird that always excited her more than any other.

versus

Running into the marsh, Laska at once detected the scent of birds all over the place – that strong smell that always excited her more than any other. It mingled with familiar smells of roots, marsh grass, slime and the and the extraneous odour of horse dung.

That’s a paragraph from Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, widely considered a masterpiece of literature. The first one is verbatim from the book, the second is an ‘improved’ version, according to AI writing tools. The software tells me that the second paragraph is more ‘correct’. Apparently it’s better because it gets to the point more quickly and it has shorter sentences (and is therefore easier to read).

But, it doesn’t sound the same. It doesn’t feel the same.

I’m often wondering whether how I write and draw is ‘correct’. Do I write the way I write, and draw the way I draw, because I’m just not competent enough to do it ‘better’? Or, is my ‘style’ just my style because, well, I just think it’s better that way – simpler, less ‘technically’ good and more ‘quirk’.

There is, of course, no right answer here, but if art is about feeling one’s way through something, than perhaps going with what feels right might be an OK way to be.

It’s easy to think that if I didn’t draw today, I’m not working my hardest. After all, time on this Earth is limited and I already know I have more projects I’d like to complete and not enough time to complete them before I’m dead.

But some days, the thought of sitting down and drawing is more difficult than others. I’m not talking about the days where I know if I can just get started, things will emerge. No, the days I’m talking about are different. Sometimes, the muscles of imagination and lateral thinking are simply tired.

So, instead of feeling bad about this – like I’m some sort of failure as an artist or not ‘keeping up’ with what it means to be a professional artist – I turn to numbers. Doing accounts, doing budgeting, processing receipts; all these things are necessary to do anyway, so, I tell myself, I’m still working, I’m just listening to what my body and brain needs, first.

It’s not an easy balance. Sometimes, those numbers days are actually just an excuse for procrastination. Doing numbers (or any procedural task) gives me a sense of forward progress and motion that, sometimes, creative work does not. Creative work often needs a bit of back and forth – some iteration to make progress eventually.

On the days I don’t feel like drawing, I need to ask myself – am I avoiding the difficult work? Or, is my body telling me it’s time to rest and come back stronger when it’s ready, willing and able?

As we grow from children to adults, we learn things. We learn what’s possible and not possible in the world. We learn that there’s no such thing as invisibility. We learn that animals can’t talk to us as humans can talk to one another. We learn that humans can’t breathe underwater. We learn medicine works better than magic when we’re sick. That certain fruits and vegetables only grow at certain times of a year.

These are all useful things for survival, but not so great for imagining new and different things. Is it a coincidence that adults often refer to children as ‘having imagination’, but often never say the same thing of another adult?

Perhaps imagination is not some gift that only lasts for as long as childhood. Perhaps it’s possible to cultivate it in ourselves by retraining how strictly we accept how the world works as we age. In fact, some of the most ‘imaginative’ stories that exist in our culture seem to be proof. In these stories, there is invisibility, animals can talk, humans can breathe underwater, and magic works better than medicine to cure sickness.

This is not some call-to-arms to let misinformation about the world proliferate in a post-truth era, it’s simply a reminder to myself – perhaps the way to more imaginative storytelling is to think about the rules of the world and then think, what if it wasn’t like that? What if, on a snowy walk one day, I found a fig in winter?

This post was inspired by a quite from Epictetus which reads, “What you love is nothing of your own: it has been given to you for the present, not that it should not be taken from you, nor has it been given to you for all time, but as a fig is given to you or a bunch of grapes at the appointed season of the year. But if you wish for these things in winter, you are a fool.” And while Epictetus was talking about our false sense of ownership over the world and how little we control, the idea of a fig in winter, as foolish as it sounds, feels exactly the sort of ‘nonsense’ we need to embrace a little more in order to fire up our imaginations and create a world of possible in our writing.

This journal runs on a commitment; a commitment to myself that I would write something to my future self once a week – something I’ve learned or an insight I’ve had. I began the practice because I found it useful in helping me learn and grow as an artist and a human. A weekly reflection, so to speak.

The truth is, I didn’t write last week. In fact, this journal project was the furthest thing from my mind for the past fortnight. Why? Because there were more important things to deal with – a family health crisis that needed my full and undivided attention for a while. The crisis moment is over but it’s likely that the next few months, maybe years, will need more attention than I’ve given it in the past; and I value that more than this journal.

If one starts searching, ‘How to be a successful or productive artist’, it won’t take anyone very long to come across what I call ‘no matter what’ commitments. These are artists or business people who say that the only way to be ‘successful’ or make progress with your art is to “Write a page a day, a chapter a night, keep a sketchbook, do a doodle in the morning… no. matter. what.”

But, I’m not sure anyone really means that though. After all, every person is different –  we’ve all got varying levels of actual no-matter-what commitments already; meeting mortgage repayments or paying off student debts, putting food on the table, caring for the ones we love or like, investing in our physical health through exercise and eating good food – all these things take time, energy, and attention and, let’s be frank, are more fundamental to our physiological existence than writing a page a day.

I used to think this journal was my no-matter-what commitment. That’s kind of how it started. And, to be fair to the no-matter-what evangelists, the idea of that commitment has had benefits. But, when it comes down to it, our no-matter-what commitments are fundamentally driven by our values – the things we feel are most important to us at any given time. Right now, for me, that’s providing support to a family that needs it.

This all doesn’t mean I won’t journal regularly – after all, I’m doing it right now – it’s useful for my mental health to write things down and, through this practice, discover and embody what I’ve learned. But if the point of this journal is to help me learn and grow as an artist and a human, maybe, sometimes, I can achieve the same thing by simply being – investing my time and attention in the things that are truly most important to me. Surely paying attention to those things, no matter what, won’t just help me be a person I want to be, but might also turn me into a better artist, too.